LIVE: JOHN – 29/01/2020

The post-punk revival is raging, fuelled by the B word and the government and the utter bollocks we wake up to on the news every day.

John (or John (timestwo) for internet purposes) are a duo of John’s from Crystal Palace – ‘I’m John, he’s John, we’re John’ they announce, one John sporting a ‘The World Isn’t Working’ t-shirt.

On a miserable Wednesday night, the pair create a sound that is bigger than the tiny Deaf Institute. It is a sound that you can feel snaking up the flock wallpaper and the slightly out of place velvet curtains, wrapping round a bouncing audience.

Formed in 2013, it’s obvious that they’ve perfected their live presence; they’ve previously joined Idles as their support act and performed a live session for KEXP. More recently, they’ve been touted on Radio 6 Music.

Surprisingly, there’s no raging around the stage, no jumping into the audience with flailing arms that often accompanies settings as raucous as this. Throughout the set, they’re stationary, Guitar John simply swaying as they’re enveloped in an increasingly loud bubble for the duration.

At times, they teeter on metal, the guitar thrashing and wild beneath shouted lyrics that are evocative of their peers, Idles and Slaves. They continuously manage to conjure these big, soaring, echoing riffs that leave a whirling sea of noise behind. Even if you knew them, you’d struggle to decipher the lyrics as they’re spat out, and you don’t really need to know them, you just know that they’re absolutely fuming.

Opening with ‘Squad Vowels’ they then power through tracks from their 2019 album, Out Here On The Fringes, and the 2017 God Speed In The National Limit. They only pause momentarily to ask the craning heads on the balcony if they’re enjoying the ‘penthouse suite.’

They reach into the archives for ‘Dust,’ a 2015 song that they modestly ‘bet nobody knows.’

The peaks are ‘High Digger’ and ‘Future Thinker’ but the energy is constant. They end with ‘Solid State’, completing just over an hour of fast paced brilliance before they bow out as quickly as they arrived.